


Eat Like You're Starving, Your Turn Will Come [Fic]

by cantarina



Category: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: Community: comment_fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-24
Updated: 2009-12-24
Packaged: 2017-11-01 14:34:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/357915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cantarina/pseuds/cantarina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fresh fruit was all-but unheard of in the future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eat Like You're Starving, Your Turn Will Come [Fic]

At first, fresh fruit doesn't taste right.

By the time Jesse places Riley in a foster home, the wonder of so much food hasn't really worn off yet. Riley still eats too quickly and sometimes too much and she never turns anything down. Her foster parents rightly assume that she's been starved, even if they can't possible guess the cause of it. Until Jesse talked her down, that makes Riley nervous, like she's already screwed up everything.

Riley has seen fruit before, mostly the dried slices of papaya and apple that sometimes came over from Australia. (Will come over? The verb tenses are just one more thing she finds confusing in this time and place.) She knew about scurvy and swallowed the fruit down, even if it was half-rotten or mouldy. Food had gotten to them like that more often than anyone ever stopped to think about back then, too desperate to fill their stomachs.

Once, just the once, one of the scouts from their camp had come back with a handful of wild strawberries and a story about a plant peeping up through the rubble, clawing its way back to life. For a little while, it had gone unsaid. Before the robots could find it and torch it. Riley had understood that part even then. It had been impossible for any of them not to.

The berries had been tiny and pale - not really ripe, someone had said - but the one bite she'd had been been tart and juicy and it had tasted like nothing she'd ever eaten before.

The huge, bright red strawberries at the grocery store in the past, in her new here-and-now, look wrong. The papaya and apples don't have the right texture or taste at all. Riley can still remember the first time she walked into a grocery store and how impossible the rows and rows of fresh fruit and vegetables had seemed.

Still. Even if it tastes and looks wrong, she eats the fresh strawberries and papaya and apples, because she doesn't turn down food even now and maybe, just maybe, because she thinks that they taste better this way after all.

And because even if she sometimes thinks about how this mission is supposed to save them all, she can't quite bring herself to believe that this luxury will never end.


End file.
